Samarra
by filistinist
Summary: There was no way this boy could be the son of Hugh Barebone, are you kidding? He could have been Judas, or Lucifer. Leonardo da Vinci used to paint such faces... Translation of Самарра by Vinmar, on AO3. (Warning: underage sex. Cross-posted to AO3)


The dinner promised to be boring; just as boring as the friend who'd invited Percival Graves to it.

And actually, you couldn't even consider them friends—they met under circumstances that don't predispose to friendship. Graves was a tax auditor, and he had come in to review the corporate law firm where Hugh Barebone labored as one of its lawyers. He found out later that it was Barebone's dream to work his way up to junior partner (the senior partner position never even figured in his fantasies), but Graves could see that the man had no more of a chance of reaching that post than pulling a star from the sky.

Hugh Barebone was a flabby, pudgy blond of about fifty, and somehow reminded Percival Graves of cheese.

Percival's own reflection in the mirror was still something to envy. He was lucky with his face and body, regardless of how thoroughly he abused them with alcohol, drugs, and random hookups. Good genes, what can you say. And letting loose occasionally was a necessity for him—you can't imagine how much, and how hard, tax auditors have to work. Sometimes he had to spend twenty-four hours in other people's offices, for months on end, feeling the dark energy of everyone's collective hatred trickling down his back. Because no one likes an auditor. But Percival didn't give a damn about that, not for a long time. Other people's emotions just rolled off his back like water.

Whereas Barebone was probably too naive to be working in law. Naive, conservative, and almost innocent. Graves would have bet he was a virgin, if it wasn't for Olivia, the man's energetic redhead of a wife.

It all started with Olivia, actually. She was the exuberant artistic type, a housewife who fancied herself a free-spirited artist, and regularly attended watercolor lessons from some smarmy Italian. Somehow, very suddenly and very rapidly, she and Graves's own wife Donna became thick as thieves. Donna, a pretty blonde, was a lot more modest than her new friend, but she'd always dreamed of being attached to a bohemian crowd, and Graves decided not to disillusion her. Now the ladies paid visits to the Italian together, and Graves didn't object. Nowadays even his children couldn't melt the ice over his heart. Both his son and daughter were away at college.

Graves himself had just turned forty-two. There were some advantages to an early marriage and fatherhood, after all.

He thought that he'd simply forgotten how to feel. Was it possible to become a sociopath halfway through your life? Definitely possible, if you were a tax auditor.

The Barebones lived in Oakland, in a two-story house which looked just as boring they did: big and white, like winter. Although the drive up to the Bay Bridge, which connected San Francisco to Oakland, made a pretty good impression. Lately, it's been easy on the eyes, decorated with a myriad of white LED lights, which could form any pattern imaginable. On this quiet September evening, Graves felt like he was driving his posh Chrysler convertible into a lacy web of pearls.

Donna was sitting next to him and yakking non-stop on the phone with Olivia—goddammit, couldn't she give it rest, they were on their way to see Olivia as it was!

But Graves stayed silent. It seemed to him that in reality, Donna was far away from him, and he was in the car alone. Just him and the white lights of the bridge shining through the blue twilight. And the breaklights of the cars in front of him, looking like the eyes of some fantastical creatures.

The guests supposedly had a home-made dinner to look forward to, but culinary arts were clearly not Olivia's strong suit. The clam chowder was sour, the meat rubbery, the beans devoid of salt, the salad greens had seen fresher days. But Hugh did get lucky with his wine purchase.

To be honest, they lay on the alcohol quite a bit, in honor of finishing a difficult period at work—both had just closed a case with complicated clients. They must have drunk a couple bottles between the two of them, and then went outside to get some fresh air. Donna and Olivia were so absorbed by their conversation that they no longer noticed anything around them. They were too busy exuding mutual admiration, which was oozing like honey out of their every pore.

Oh, and the Barebone's fifteen-year-old daughter was also sitting at the table, bland and quiet as a mouse. She looked very much like her father: the same skin the color of cheese, the same gelatinous body parts. She was poking at the beans listlessly with her fork.

When they came back in from the patio, Graves felt it—something had changed. Now there was a kind of dark energy hovering in the room, prickling at the skin on the back of his neck and the tips of his fingers. As if the air was suddenly filled with electricity and an ocean wind blew right into the dining room.

"So this is your new friend, Dad, the one you talk about so much? That badass Mr. Graves, who succeeds at everything in life, unlike you?"

Two brown eyes with a foxy slant were staring at Graves point blank, and the eyelashes fluttering above them were so long that they cast shadows across half his cheeks, and those unbelievable eyebrows... clownish, Graves thought at first, but after a moment, he came to appreciate their shape and placement. Like a swallow spreading its narrow wings against the marble of that forehead. Delicate.. such delicate facial features... sharp cheekbones... There was no way this boy could be the son of Hugh Barebone, are you kidding? He could have been Judas, or Lucifer, Leonardo da Vinci used to paint such faces. But the Barebones?

"Percival, meet my son, Credence. He can have a very sharp tongue sometimes."

"Stepson." Credence made a mocking bow, rising a little from the table and pressing a hand to his chest. "What can you expect from us difficult teenagers. It's our age. The absolutism of a transitional period, you understand."

"Credence is seventeen," Olivia surfaced for a moment from her conversation. "He's not really the child he sometimes pretends to be."

"Thanks, Mom." Credence gave her a wide smile, and this smile gleamed like a gift from the Magi—meant for the king of kings, for a god... or for someone who was destined to perish.

Maybe there was something in the wine.

"Mom, does the soup seem a bit sour to you? What do you think, Mr. Graves?"

"Credence, leave Mr. Graves alone," Olivia waved him off. "Donna and I were just discussing how nice it would be to visit the new gallery on Monday. Luigi's friend opened it. Will you come with us?"

"No, no, no," Credence raised his hands, palms up. "All your affairs with these pseudo-luminaries of the art world... leave me out of them."

"But Cesare really does paint very well," Donna interceded timidly.

Credence seemed to dumbfound her.

"I won't argue with that, but I would still rather go to the Walt Disney Museum. Have you ever been there, Mr. Graves? Do they really have movies that no one's ever seen?"

"Never got around to it," shrugged Percival.

He caught himself chewing the beans mechanically, not even feeling the taste.

"That's too bad. You probably never lift your head from your paperwork. Have you always lived in San Francisco?"

"No, we moved here five years ago. Donna and I like it here."

"And I'm sure you've never even seen the city properly. Always working and working. Just like my father. No wonder you became such good friends. You're probably just as boring as he is. Stand on left, walk on right, anyone attempting to escape will be shot... am I right?"

Graves was slowly simmering to a boil. The eyes across from him scattered fiendish sparks, pierced him like daggers, burned with a dark flame. He kept forgetting that the person in front of him was just a boy, a boy in faded jeans and a funny t-shirt with some pretentious writing on it, with scratches on his arms, skinny and awkward.

Although he should stop lying to himself—there was nothing awkward about Credence Barebone. He looked like he'd never been the product of Olivia's pedestrian womb, but was lovingly painted by one smooth sweep of an angel's wing.

"I really don't see why my father admires you so much," said Credence, more quietly, when Hugh joined the heated discussion about the newly-opened gallery, and the mousy daughter made herself scarce. "Other than the fact that you're smoking hot, like a live wire, but that's not in my dad's line. So it couldn't be your dark eyes, or your expressive eyebrows, or your clever fingers, that drew him in. Or your strong chin, or the biceps under that Prada sweater. It must be that you radiate, what's it called, _an aura of success_. My parents believe in that bullshit."

"Credence, hon, are you sure you won't come with us to see Cesare on Monday? You have to do that project on contemporary art! This seems like a good topic!"

"I'll think about it, Mom, maybe you're right," Credence replied in a studiously sweet tone, without ever taking his eyes off Graves.

Graves was shivering visibly.

In the end, they all drank another six bottles or so, and the Graves spent the night at the Barebone house, as they'd planned from the beginning. Donna had even packed her husband a t-shirt to sleep in, and pajama pants. The pants sported a stretched-out print of chess pieces, while the t-shirt was plain white, thank god.

Graves felt a little uncomfortable: he and Donna ended up in the same bed for the first time in months, and she even suggested that they have sex, but then rejected her own idea, allowing that it would be "just plain disrespectful to Olivia and her husband." Then they both fell into a drunken sleep, and in that sleep, Graves was once again driving over the bridge, but it was covered in a tangle of white spiderwebs.

He woke up from a horrible thirst and, creaking down the wooden stairs, went to the kitchen for a drink of water. Then he washed his face at the sink, and for some reason didn't go back up to the bedroom, but took a lime from the table, cut it into circles, and chewed a couple of them slowly, wincing at their sour freshness.

The kitchen had one door leading out to the rest of the house, and one outside onto the patio. The patio was now completely swallowed in darkness, and the smell of the wild grapevines which clung to the wall outside wafted in through the half-open window.

Percival Graves just stood there, waiting for something.

And when the second door creaked, he realized what he was waiting for.

"Mr. Graves," a voice drawled mockingly behind him. "Couldn't sleep? You're so modest, really... Mom gave you the bedroom in the furthest corner of the house, on purpose, so you could fuck in peace. But you didn't take advantage of her generosity. And didn't give me an opportunity to jerk off."

"You like to listen to grownups having sex?"

"Oh, no, usually that doesn't interest me."

"So what drew your interest this time?"

"I wanted to listen to you moan. _That_ I could've jerked off to. _Do_ you actually moan, Mr. Graves? Or are you so inhumanly masculine that you do everything silently? No, you're not that much of a brute. There's a certain vulnerability in your eyes. A weakness, you know, which is so sweet. As if you're just waiting for someone to come into your life, so you can let them _torment_ you. But it never seems to turn out that way, does it? You always end up in the role of the tormentor yourself, don't you? Though I don't claim to be a prophet or anything..."

"Do you ever shut up?"

They were standing face to face now. Credence was still in the same soft gray t-shirt with the red sign on the front: _Death waits for you in Samarra_. His hair was tangled, his bare feet looked like they belonged to a dervish wandering in the desert: narrow, tanned, and dusty. As if Credence had been walking in circles outside the house with no shoes on, and never went to bed at all.

He wondered, was it Jewish or Eastern blood which gave him that unlikely combination of the most striking features? Most likely Jewish, thought Graves fitfully as he forced his own hands behind his back and locked his fingers together til they hurt.

Only someone from Judea could be like this. Like the reflection of a white rose in a silver mirror.

"But you gave me a gift, Mr. Graves. The thing I wished for the most. Not the echo of your moans, but you yourself, alive and warm, under my fingers."

And lightly, weightlessly, Credence traced the contour of Graves's cheek with the palm of his hand, then ran it down his chest, barely touching. The white t-shirt, packed so thoughtfully by his wife, now played a cruel trick on Percival: it was too thin, much too thin to conceal the instant tightening of his nipples. And the pants turned out to be too flimsy as well. Everything was as obvious as it could possibly get.

But even if Percival had been standing there in a down parka, it wouldn't have saved him—he was shivering so hard that the glasses on a tray behind him shook and tinkled, as if a train was passing nearby.

And that asshole was smiling. Oh, how he smiled, as no man or woman had even smiled at Graves in his entire promiscuous secret life. He never even knew that people could smile like that. Like an angel offering you cocaine.

"So will you kiss me, Mr. Graves, or will I have to wait forever?"

After that, Percival Graves plunged into pitch darkness for a good five minutes. When he resurfaced, he was pressing the boy against the door and holding his wrists above his head. And rubbing up against him with his whole body as he savaged his mouth like he was trying to ease a deadly thirst, to extract nectar from a flower, to squeeze the juice from a ripe fruit to the last drop. As if he was drowning and this was the only way he could breathe.

And Credence's lips were far from unskilled. They were savaging him right back. No one had ever kissed Percival like that, as if now he belonged to them completely, with nothing held back, as if he'd become a thing, an object they owned.

Credence was the first to tear away from the kiss, wrenching a groan out of Graves.

He shouldn't have looked at him for that long. There may be women with painted eyes and blush on their cheekbones, but still, his eyes were darker and his cheekbones more delicate than theirs. Nothing will be the same as before, Percival, because if this young man so much as glances at you through a cold fall mist, or maybe smiles at you, you would do anything for him. Because he has the eyes of a fox, a cat, luminous like amber, darker than the darkest night.

"We're making too much noise," Credence whispered, untangling his hands from his grip and placing them on Percival's neck, with a practiced gesture, as if he'd done it a thousand times before.

Percival pressed their foreheads together and tried to catch his breath.

"On Tuesday... Tuesday, because on Monday I'll drag my ass to that Italian guy's stupid gallery show, my mother is right, I'll need it for my project... You'll pick me up at school and drive me away in your _pimped-out_ ride... And don't even think about renting some nondescript car, it has to be the convertible... Because I want you to risk everything for me, got it?... You'll drive me somewhere downtown. And then, Mr. Graves, you'll get your chance to explore all the museums of this wonderful city... Museums are a good place to indulge in depravity, and there _will_ be depravity, Mr. Graves, I promise you..."

"Three days," said Graves hollowly. "I can't stand it. I can't wait that long. You know I can't."

"I can't make it any earlier," said Credence mildly, and blew gently on his sweaty temple. "But then on Tuesday, I'll suck you off in the car. How do you want it?"

Percival shut his eyes.

"I think I'll be completely out of it," he said, "just like that, my brain will shut down completely."

"And that's good. You'll grab me by the hair and force me down on your cock, and when you come to your senses, you'll see that you've been fucking my throat, long and hard, like an animal, and spilled deep inside it. And I'll have tears in my eyes and a ridiculously swollen mouth. And you'll think that you've never let yourself go that much with any woman. Ever."

"You little bitch," whispered Percival with agonized tenderness.

"And how do you want to fuck me?"

Percival started to feel queasy. He swallowed.

"I would... I would lie on top of you, to feel you with my whole body, and move my hips, obscene and greedy, like a beast gorging on something forbidden. And then I'll put you on your hands and knees and hold you down by your hair, while I plow into you to the balls... while I pound all your stupid crap out of you..."

"I sincerely hope you act like a complete _douchebag_ in bed. Like an egotistic pig," Credence singsonged into his ear. "I'll be disappointed if you don't."

"No, you won't be disappointed."

"You can find out my school's address yourself, I won't spoil your fun."

"You're _such_ an asshole."

"In California, relations with a minor are penalized _severely_ , Mr. Graves."

"Such an _unbelievable_ asshole."

"I'm the son of your friend."

"He's not my friend. And you're not his son. And I want you now, do you hear me? Do you hear? Or are you deaf? Everything, right now!"

Credence slipped out of his arms delicately, like a cat, blew him a kiss, and vanished behind the door. Percival's hands were shaking as he picked up a pack of cigarettes from the table and went out on the patio. He was swaying on his feet, even though the wine was long gone from his blood. Now he had poison in his blood instead.

In the morning he drank coffee with Donna and Olivia—the kids were still sleeping and Hugh had gone out on some errand of his own. Later on, Percival called his daughter at her university, washed the convertible, mowed the lawn, played tennis with a neighbor, and performed hundreds of other pointless movements to kill time over that unimaginably long weekend, endless like the tortures of hell. On Monday he was shuffling from foot to foot at the gallery of Cesare Sarto, who looked like the twin brother of Gianluca Vacchi, the dancing millionaire. His paintings were just as vacuous as his sleek, spraytanned face.

Olivia informed them that Credence decided a gallery visit would be "a totally pointless waste of time." But Cesare was kind enough to let him use images of his latest conceptual pieces from his website, so the school project was coming along.

On Tuesday, Graves lied his ass off at work so that on that bright, cool afternoon pierced by ocean breezes, he could sit in his golden convertible near the school football field and watch all the exits, hiding his face behind giant sunglasses. He was already starting to despair when the convertible rocked lightly—Credence had jumped in, agile as a street thief.

He immediately laid a proprietary hand on Graves's knee, then slid his palm higher, making his eyes roll back with pleasure.

They barely drove behind the cover of some bushes, when Credence fulfilled his first promise—before Percival could say a word, his cock was covered by a hot mouth. And then it all happened just as Credence had described. Graves pounded up into that silky throat like he was living out the last day of his fucking life. He moaned, made the leather seat squeak as he rocked his hips up, and yanked roughly on the thick black curls of Credence's hair. Salome must have had curls just like that. The color, and even the feel of them—like night itself.

When he came, it felt as if the sun had poured its heat all over him and embedded a solar storm in his eyes, despite the dark sunglasses.

But even half-blinded, he could clearly make out the second part of the inscription on Credence's t-shirt, when he leaned over the convertible's side to spit the cum out of his mouth. It was the same gray t-shirt. Graves remembered very well what it said on the front:

 _Death waits for you in Samarra._

The hopeless conclusion of the phrase stretched in blood-spatter lettering over his back. Graves shut his eyes in resignation. He knew it already.

 _You can't avoid Samarra._


End file.
